Better Than Life
by CellCloneBot
Summary: A philosophical approach of why a man would not choose to know the truth about the matrix. Honest, self insertion, paranoia. A following guide of chapters of the Taoist text of TaoDeChing written by Lao Tzu, the Old Master.
1. 1 The Way

Better Than Life  
  
Chapter One: The Way  
  
By: Cornel Kennedy  
  
The outsiders wanted to let me know before they revealed their true identity. The secret has been hidden away in the literature to the most mindless commercial. John Cage, a modern composer said that art was not to create masterpieces but to wake to your life. I'm drunk.   
  
I wake and take in my surroundings. What else could one do when waking but take in his surroundings? A song called 'I am Mud' repeated on the application running on my computer. I have discovered that the internet is not a real thing, and they have left me with the problem to decide if this world is real or not. Who are they? Artists. Escape artists. As they distract the minds of my keepers, they give me hints and set up coincidences for me to recognize. From what I can figure, I am in a system called Better Than Life. I have dubbed my prison this after my favourite British comedy series, Red Drawf. Yes, my surroundings. My keepers have labelled me a paranoid schizophrenic. People in this prison I roam have come to accept the safe guards of a person like me knowing the truth. We are set against each other to occupy our minds from the truth. The truth? It's in my surroundings. My desk that my computer abides is not real. My five string guitar in its old hard black case is not real. It's a program.  
  
What we know about DNA is a program, but though more complex. Who can say how much more a program will grow? Our DNA consists of four different opinions, and this is the same for all life. If life can adopt, so could the programs that have trapped us in this system that makes my surroundings. Drugs are the defects of this system. Did I mention that I was drunk?  
  
There is one thing to do when awaking, and that is to learn about one's surroundings, but that is not the only aspect that a person can endure. The song that is playing; I don't know how I downloaded it. It fits my situation so well I would call it a coincidence of the outsiders. You may can them angels, but they hardly return your calls. There are so many possiblities for what could happen next.   
  
An instant message beeps on my computer and a new window opens. It has been a while since I have check what the internet has told me. Trinity is her username, everyone else on my list is blocked. They are either not real, or enjoy this system. It is said that one characteristic of paranoid Schizophrenia is a constant fear of being watched. What if we were? Give a fancy name for a person who enjoys breathing, and we would all be labelled hopeless crazy addicts.   
  
I peek at my screen. Trinity has written: "Have you felt it yet?"  
  
Another bullshit ambiguous question I can read. I do wonder if the outsiders are any kinder than my keepers. If I was true, would I be happier not knowing the truth about being enslaved in a computer system? It is funny that I have dubbed this system, Better Than Life. A bottle of beer has a bit left with the cap used as an useless astray. It's okay; nothing is real. I can only respond to her in equally ambiguous answers. This is the art of flirting with one who is described to be mentally ill.   
  
"Is there a body for me to return to?" My screenname, Sage, says. I am uncomfortable dealing with this famous hacker. For all I know, she has put the money forth to make my life a living hell and have released all of my personal information. How far has technology advanced? I can't be sure, only undecisive, which is a trait of my illness, they say.   
  
"Yes." Trinity types to me. I see her as an angel, though I do not believe in heaven or hell. I'm an atheist, though the thought of another reality beyond what I have grown to known is metaphysical in itself. There are explainations, and there are excuses as well.   
  
"Give me a chance to see your truth." I beg her. Knocks emit from my door. I walk carelessly to open the door. It is not locked, for I believe I cannot go on living. Let me sleep and kill me without a mistake. I open the door and a slender woman in tight black clothing tackles me to the ground, and effortlessly raises me up to the ceiling. I am drunk.  
  
My head is plunged into the dirty fish bowl, with dead tropical fish bobbing up and down the green covered top. I rest there without moving. It is sexual. This woman has totally kicked my ass, and has given me relief. Though I am an atheist, I do proclaim myself to be a Buddhist, Taoist, and a follower of Confucius. If they are real or not, the systems show me to love. Is this brain washing? Then I feel clean. This is not the normal thoughts that are going through a man's head while a woman is killing him. Maybe this act of violence will show her the Way. I couldn't profess my love of these eastern philosophies without loving her to no end. Prehaps there is no end, and I will endure this dead. In defeat, she pulls me out of the water. I gasp a bit, but I am going with her flow and trust her in everyway, like a sage. This is the time I will achieve enligthenment. She looks at me. Her hair is short and black and I can tell she is dangerous. Confucius said: "The wise do not approach the dangerous." A man of wisdom who would lead many noble men to enrich the world could be humble enough to love Lao Tzu. Yes, I was being murdered. My mindfulness must be addressed. "Do you wish to say the last word?" I offer her dearly.  
  
"What did you want most when I dunked your head in the water." She asked me and tipped by head with beautiful force near the natural smelly water.   
  
"The truth." I answered automatically. "The true path." My lips splash in the water and bubbles emerge around my mouth. "However, I do not ask anything of you."  
  
She submerges my head under water again as if she knew it would bring me pleasure. I waited for my life to past before my eyes, but I was in a fish tank that was not real. I was sustained with air that was not real. There was nothing this system could offer me, and I ended all desires. It was the true path I wanted. She pulled me out again, and I got a good look at her slim face covered in large black sunglasses.   
  
"Do you know that I can kill you without even blinking?" She said with a cocky smirk that filled me with warmth.  
  
"Do you know that I can be killed without even blinking?" I responded. All of my learning of eastern religions helped me. I thought of religion as a goal and a task rather than a truth. We describe to our own reality. "Take all you need to fill your way."  
  
"Therefore it is said: Who understands the Way seems foolish; Who progresses on the Way seems to fail; Who follows the Way seems to wander." She recites softly like a beginning of a Shakespeare sonnet, and cliches aside, I believe most fittingly one the dark lady sonnets.   
  
"Trinity," I could not help myself but laugh like an ass. It was Christmas eve, and I was drunk. Trinity, as the only thing I would call her with her pale face over mine and her hands holding me against the floor. She could sense my thoughts, as I allowed her to dive deep into my oceanic mind.  
  
"Who do you love?" She asked me thinking she had reached the bottom of my essense. "  
  
I say, "I love the truth, and if I were still mysteriously in the tank, I wish to die in reality." She righted me up with ease with her strenght.   
  
She lead me to a car, and I followed her without question. When we had went outside of my apartment building, the street lies with garbage. She opens the door to the back, and her intention I will not guess. Before she closes the door, she looks at me like any keeper. Both keepers and outsiders knew so much about me that their appearance would be no different as any adult to an adbandoned adolescense. "It will get much worst, when you continue the path."  
  
She enters the front seat, and her lover starts the car. I could tell as he looks similar to her. In reality, they would look much worst as she had put it. Their skeleton bodies would wrap tigher to the bone, and any flesh would cease to be there. They had fasted in reality, I assume. I also had fasted here, but I would not be shocked if my body were fit to hang coats upon once entering their uninhabitable wasteland. "It's not that bad," the driver spoke as if he had read my mind, which I hated as each side seemed to know everything about me, "you just need a mission to pass the time. You never have to return to this place. Nothing is forced upon you where we can take you."  
  
"I would say that it is nice where you are taking me." I lie in the region of white. The driver chuckles like some around me who had understood jokes that I had not. Moments like this, I had thought the audience were controlled by one of the sides.  
  
"Don't encourage him," Trinity steps in and whips her lover. His name is Neo, and I had spoke to him a few times over the internet. The car stopped like they were tracking people from around the neighbour like the keepers were at a lost to oversee me. "This is your choice. You're free in our eyes."  
  
She opens the car door for me and we walk up a stone stair case into the building. I wonder if building look this disgusting because of the limitations of the program running in the system or our human capacity to accept differences. I follow them to a large room a few flights up and a black bald baster boasts himself upon a red leather chair. This was no more than a routine for these guys. "I am glad to meet with you, Sage." The man speaks. "Please, have a seat."  
  
"As you requested," I say to impose if they truly had thought of me as a being with free will. I sat on a similar chair across from him. His fleshly hands rest upon his chin and he looks at me. "I am all ears."  
  
"Good to hear that." He says. "And what do you know?"  
  
"I know that the truth is better than life," I answer.  
  
He looks over to Trinity who I am sure gave her agreement after our engagement. "Excellent," he says and stays silent so long that the grandfather clock rings eleven times. "I am to give you a choice. I understand that you are intoxicated, but you have pasted your own test you have given to yourself."  
  
"The test I created?" I wondered.  
  
"Yes," he started, "you see, we have given the keepers a truly tough time and are able to take people who are near the source of the truth to join us if we see that they have provided us with a worthy task they have found. You have taken on the task of a student who wishes to find god in the taoist story. This story revolves around a student who comes upon a sage and wants to know god. The sage brings the student under water and then asks what the student most wanted. The students answered air, and the sage replied to the student that when he wants to know god as much as he wants air, that he could join him. You have given your mind to know the truth, and therefore we can reveal it to you."  
  
"And what is my choice?" I ask.  
  
He puts out his two fists and opens each one to show a red and blue pill. "The pill in my right hand will show you the way you seek." He closes his hand on the way and I try not to look at the other one. "The pill in my left hand will bring you back to your better than life system as if nothing happened. You will no longer be paranoid about your surroundings and have no questions. We would never exist to you."  
  
I reach for the pill in the left hand and put it in my mouth. "I am not yet trustworthy."   
  
I shallow.   
  
--------End---------  
  
This may or may not be a one time thing. I am truly drunk at the moment, and I don't know if this is at par with my other works. This is more of an experiment, and will continue if I see fit. 


	2. 2 Abstraction

Better Than Life  
Chapter Two: _Abstraction_  
By: Cornel Kennedy  
  
When I wake, then sleep has been implied. When I take in my surroundings, then lost has been implied. The Primus song, "Welcome to This World", that I had not remembered downloading, repeats on my computer. The computer zones off and ends its hum. I rest on the ground with my back against the floor. "Must be a system malfunction," I speak outloud about the system crash. Speaking to myself? Another system malfunction?   
  
Coming to is never delightful. Everything that had meaning has now been lost. It's better this way, not carrying around what ever burden of my trip. Now I can focus on why I am really here; paying taxes and dying. These things drain me, but I have always found out and then lost another source that tapped into me. It's the drugs. The mind alterating states that keep me from reality. I remember when I once saw 3D art for the first time. I had thought it looked stupid and had nothing but a choas movement. I was told that you had to unfocus your sight to see the hidden message. Well, my mind is as unfocus as they come.   
  
I pull the needle out of my arm. Why do I continually wake up like this? This is the suffering of Samsara. I am reborn back into this cycle of which I do not understand. Shit, I bet that my buddy list is erased, yet again. But I shouldn't think of the people on that list as real people. I don't know them in the real world. So my mind corrects itself on the path of the Way. What is the purpose of the internet? It may be the new way we communicate. Since our minds work by interpreting electronic pulses picked up from our environment, can we exist on a network of electronics and reform everything we think we take for granted in reality?   
  
A loud creeking comes from behind the wall touching my bed. I knee on my bed and turn my head to lean my ears against the wall. I cannot tell if it is the plumbing or two people getting it on in there. I know that no one lives in the apartment in which I am easedropping. There may be another reason why people on the streets stare at me. I have heard people whispering as they have neared me. From the hints of conversation I have picked up, I am convinced they think I am dating some chick who frequently comes into my room and kicks the shit out of me while I laugh in enjoyment. I don't know if I am into that S&M thing. I believe that I don't, but I surely am not experimental about sex. Different sex, same age, is my fetish. I don't know if that is natural of a product of being raised in this society, but I accept it and nothing else. In fact, I have been getting nothing for a while now.  
  
I bounce off my bed and mouth a string of curses, which somewhat seems more sane than talking to myself. I shouldn't be jumping on my bed with these rumours around me. I go and pick up my needle. Though I do not believe that I have injected any drugs in me - I'm an oral pill man - I do believe that I should involve myself in the city's needle exchange program. There is a program near the corner of my street, and it was were I was recommended to seek psychological treatment for my paranoid schizophrenic by the head of pharmacy, Dr. Abercrombie. I call him Mud. For everything about this man that is sharp (his ironed dry cleaned clothes, short pulled back hair cut, round tinted jazzy sunglasses, and black polished shoes as if asking to be kissed), his wit is non-existent. He's a very serious man, who I suspect has something against the human race. I wouldn't blame him. He is dealing with lying junkies, for your own sake be HONEST. They make his job hard and he is prevented from giving people in real pain and problems easy access to what they need. I was one of those junkies who came to him. But I was honest and never bugged him for a hit. He is the first person who I go to after waking up from a night I could not remember and then it is to my psychologist.   
  
I leave my appartment. People stare at me. I reach the pharmacy; the only one opened on Christmas day. It is best I don't dwell on the trap. I mean trip. Sometimes I say a different word than what I mean. Or so I would be lead to believe.  
  
Behind the counter, the pale skinned Dr. Abercrombie stands on his elevated level from the consumers. He oversees everyone and he may be justified to think as us as inferior to him. No smile, no glace from his work, and no hello or Merry Christmas. "Whut up mudt?" I speak like an idiot. I like to play around with people who think they are in power making them think less of who I am than I am. If they miscalculate me, then they have a weakness I can expose. My motions turn awkward to fool him more and I dig my hand into my dirty blue faded demin jacket. "I'm reedy for a new needle, sir."  
  
"Are you going to see your pyschologist after this?" He gives me a new needle in a clear plastic package. Mud's voice is monotone and without feeling. "Dr. Burroughs is worried about you. You see, you have slipped back, back to old habits."  
  
Is this speech pattern even human? Some people speak as if they were relying on a primative software to manufacture that tiresome drone. It is strange that things today are being compared to computers so we may understand them. Love is like a processor, and if you go into too fast, it is like you are overclocking your processor's speed and it will soon burn out. You should carry a notepad were ever you go like how every good computer has a DVD read/write drive. Sexual organs should be treated like your computer mouse; they are both amusing and fill well into the hand, but you shouldn't play with either of them all day long.   
  
It is best that I don't dwell on the trip. I am on a fainting couch with a new lining that doesn't go with the brown leather, but neither does the scum of my clothing I guess. It is a bit unreal now that I think about it.  
  
Dr. Burroughs is the city's top pyschologist. No one makes bullshit smell rosy quite expensively as him. He considers me a rival because I am his only failure. He has told me a few times that I was close to slipping out of this reality. Like most psuedo-intellects, he uses computers as an analogy to life and the mind without understanding either. Life is a bitch, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and computers are the only thing in style today that people use. He is a slim man, and I give him a bit more respect than I do Mud. Burroughs' is a puppet, but Mud is a program. That is interesting that I have given Mr. Abercrombie that name in two respects. In the Primus song, "My Name is Mud", there is a character called Alowishus Devadander Abercrombie, which Mud shares the same last name. The other coincidence in saying that Mud is a program running on the internet also called MUD. MUD is an acronym for Multiple User Dimension. I have played these text based games which have allowed me to create a unique character and I got lost in its personality. I did find out that it is not a real world and disconnected without any worries. My mind is wandering, and Dr. Burroughs has tired to get my attention for a few minutes.   
  
"Come on," he says in disgust, "wake up from your daydreams. This is why you are paranoid and can't function here. You have to accept that this is reality."  
  
He does not have to be rude and interrupt me; I was near some conclusion. I never get to make the conclusion of my wandering mind. The process is wasted in vain because outside distractions. "What is my problem again?"  
  
He shakes his head as he must have tried a few more times to get my attention and I had missed what he said. He has a wooly sweater over his weak torso. "You aren't paying attention to imporant things and dwelling on the insignificant." He flips through his notes. "You have said this about reality..."  
  
A cellphone next to his desk rings and he puts it up to his head. He puts it down and looks at me.  
  
"What did I say about reality." I ask.  
  
"I wasn't talking about what you thought about reality," he lies and starts his bullshit excuse, "you were daydreaming once again. You haven't understood a word I have said. I will say, your obsession with the number three has got to stop."  
  
"Well, tat your fucking three cent, huh?"  
  
Psychology is not a science. Science is not a religion. I am still wondering if psychology is the child of religion as science is the evolution of philosophy. Psychology has changed religious terms like soul and sin to ego and shame but does the ego exist any more than the soul? Have they freed us from the omnipotence of vagueness and given humans a concrete description of what we consist? I do not feel that a branch of science would leave us with all of its answers able to be questioned. Science has taught those who are willing to accept it that life has evolved. If this path to intelligent life has proven to be successful is questionable, but the fact that we have evolved has not. Sure there is going to be a few religious types ladden with every degree imagable except one in a field of science who would preach to me other wise, but so would there be religious types who have not accepted the fact that the earth revolves around the sun and is not on top a limitless end (contradition obvious) of turtles to support the earth. However, I do feel that there is something I am missing that science will allow but cannot explain.   
  
"That's our time for today," Dr. Burroughs shows me his watch and I see the second hand moving back. "That's our time for today."  
  
"That's our time for today," Dr. Burroughs repeats as he frequently must have done in our session. But this time it was strange, time was strange. I swear that time had repeated itself. Rather not wanting to hear the excuse he would provide me, I leave without a questioning him. Something is going on in this world, I know that I can uncover it.   
  
Not to dwell, I am outside in the urban canyons of bricks and fire escapes. Actually, I will dwell on it. Why is it so late outside? I did get lost in the building, but I could not remember where any of the doors lead. That's enough to dwell on, and I will store it in my mind.   
  
So I have found out I am obsessed with the number three. It's the third number in the whole number of series; freaky! No, there must be something deeper than that. He did repeat himself three times. Forty-Two is divisible by three also.   
  
The number three bus pulls up to my bus stop that I will take to return home. I flash the driver my bus pass and head to the back pass three black leather wearing posers in trench coats and black sunglasses. I wonder how some people can walk around in clothes without a speck of dirt on them. Heck, they talk tediously about video games. They surly appear as if they belong in a video game. "The problem he keeps on declining to follow us," he speaks in a deep calm voice, "he is stuck in a loop. It is a most strange program, he is following."  
  
The bus driver falls out of his chair, and I rush to attent to him. The bus swivels and throws me off balance to a dirty puddle on a side seat face first. I wipe the dirt out of my face and look at the head of the bus, where my vision was blurred, but I could see slits of black bouncing off the windows and ceilings. The sound of thunder filled the coach, that rolled over a few times rendering my vision useless. I finally stop with the bus with my head in slush floating with shards of glass from the window. The bus had stopped on its side and I cough out broke pieces of glass and blood. The lights above me flicker and show ahead of me the driver who had a green bolt running across his body.   
  
I stand there listless. People outside the bus yell and scream to the lord. I drool blood and I would not be surprised if my face was brused and cut as well. My body is here, but my mind carries away to the movies. I have seen scenes like this only at the movies and had ragged on the special effects used, but this was real and has given me a new respect for special effects. Video games and movies have been made on computers look closer to reality each year. Sure there was no mistaking the two paddles of Pong for anything else but two people playing ping pong, but today's children are exposed to games that allow them to kill other humans and the whole thing looks real. I am somewhat disturbed by this idea, but the hypocrisy in what I am saying is a thousand times worst than children learning to kill people. They do learn from adults, and the origin should marginally be respondable for its creation. Remember, children are not programming these games. More children aren't playing these game either; it's the adults of this civilization. We should feel the same way about technology. We can't blame a computer for crashing or causing us pain. Technology is our product and we need to take respondability for that product. Oh, the hypocrisy. I forgive myself for the jumpiness of my thought process, because I had been in a major crash. Yes, the hypocrisy. I had said that the other passengers were tediously talking about video games, yet I do as well but only in my mind. I may be no different than them, but we do differ. They are not here, and I am. They must know reality better than me. "Well," I tell my beaten body, "welcome to shock."   
  
It seems to be passed out, my body. I should join it.  
---------------------  
End of Chapter Two:  
In a pattern of writing, I am using two things: alcohol and the text of Tao De Ching written by Lao Tzu (Old Master). This is a reflection of his second chapter entitled, "Abstraction". I apologize for the soberness of this chapter. :S It's merely a buzz.


	3. 3 Without Action

Better Than Life  
Chapter Three: Without Action  
By: Cornel Kennedy  
  
This is not an action to wake. For something to be deemed an action, the person acting must have knowledge and desire. I had not known that I was asleep so that I could awake; this comes after when I take in my surroundings. As for the desire to wake up, it was a natural respondence for my body to wake when it has gone to sleep. This is harmony. This is a slight hang over also.

I had a dreamt while I had slept. Sometimes I find that I have never stopped dreaming. My mind picks out situations that I could be in and acts them out to some conclusion. I never stop these daydreams and can almost imagine while in their duration, that they are as real as the world in which I work and pay taxes.   
  
"You're awake," a light browned skin man says sitting across of me in a dusty maroon leather chair with a high back. "My name is Morpheus."  
  
He is one of the three that were on the bus when it had crashed. The other two lean against the ratty wall. I look to my other side and see my reflection in the mirror. There is a crude couple of skitches in my lip and some slight swelling. My head is neatly combed and parted to the left.   
  
"Could you ever know how many times you have been here?" He asks me.  
  
"Fifty times?" I guess. "I really don't have a great memory."  
  
"Fifty times a year since you were 13." He corrects me.  
  
"13?" I say. "That's when I was labelled with paranoid personality disorder. Or was it schizotypal personality disorder?"   
  
"I know from speaking to you over the years, that you don't trust that there are such things as mental illnesses." Morpheus states. "They are no more than a way to control people from seeking the truth."  
  
"I am a cave, a mere shadow of my self, relating to other projections and echoes." I say.  
  
"Precisely. This is Plato's cave. A prison constructed to bond humanity to keep their eyes on the path they have set for us. Some of us have been able to expell from this cave and help others who are close to finding this disturbing truth. Slaves, we are to the machines and seek the truth they provide; but wireless we may be left to believe, yet everything had its bondages." Morpheus says.  
  
His speech pattern is grand and even has hints of pretentiousness, but it is human and perfect in that it is flawed. It would need some translation and I am sure to interpret his words in my own context that he did not intend. However, this is how I understand him. The progress of communication has developed to a trend of freedom in mobility. The trend has ended up causing less freedom than what was expected. At one time, phone cords were so short and the network so limited that no one on either end could strangle themselves with the cord or be sad with whom they have connected. This has caused the greatest conversations as connecting with another user would be lucky, so out of the ordinary. The person on the other end would have to make an effort to be received the incoming tranmission and would not be trapped after the conversation finished. In the advancement of technology, there is no cord and there are no limits. People are walking around with a noose of the network and cannot escape from it. If one cannot escape from something, then they cannot be free.   
  
Imagine a network were one does not only connect to this network but has the network connect to her. What would this network say to her? Generally, it is not difficult to emulate the conversation carried on a limitless network with no cords. There is nothing special about the advance communication network and no effort needed to connect to it. There is no excitement to receiving, so the quality of what is given would not exert the network. A machine would have to record information about the weather, daily sport teams, and celebrity break up which is already carried on the network. If the machines are left to control the network, then they control the information. Since a conversation is the tranfering of information, the machine supporting the network has already recorded what users want to hear. The machine would meet its own expectation of what it controls to be the user's expectation. Everyone is connected. Lain had told me this.   
  
Fingers snap at me. "Hey, you were trapped in a loop."  
  
"Huh?" I return in a daze. "What do you mean by loop?"  
  
"Every single object in your environment is a program. When you smell a rose, it can make you access your memory bank to when you remembered the smell of roses. Maybe it would make you recall a date with a special lady you have not thought about in years. The reason you have been here many times is because objects around you have made you run a program to direct you to making statements and conclusions that everything around you is an illusion of the machines. Keywords, events, and triggers set your mind on these loops. In this world, your mind is described to be paranoid, but it is so effective that all most everything will set you off on these loops." Morpheus says. Yeah, loops. I'll jump through loops for you. What I want is out of the illusion of samsara and... I shake my head. "There you go off again in your program that has sent you here. This is not an exceptable program to the machines. They are programmed to ensure that you accept the information picked up by your senses. This is why they make you think that you're confused about reality and mentally ill. And this is why we come to you with a way out of your loop. In one of my hands, there is a blue pill. A red pill is in my other. Choose the one in my right hand, and you can continue your loop. Choose the one in my left hand, and you are free from this prison."  
  
I start to move my hand to his right hand and he closes his fists. "Consider this. Let's have fate decide where you go." He puts his hands behind his back and sits at the edge of his seat. "Pick a hand."  
  
"Morpheus!" A man shouts. Morpheus raises a finger to the man who had raisen his voice. "I don't think this is the correct way to convert him."  
  
"I understand your objection, Neo." He says. Yeah, Neo, I have used his programs before but they were circulating old dated ones at the club. "My friend doesn't like the idea of destiny, but reality is not something that can be fully liked. Who you give your destiny to fate?"  
  
"No." I say. "Fate implies that I would not know the outcome."  
  
"And you don't like that?" Morpheus asks. "Not having control."  
  
"Fate implies that I would not know the answer." I say. "But the answer is in your hands."  
  
"That is true. If you say, the hand that I have the pill to sent you free, then I will keep it that way. And if you say otherwise, I can switch. But the difference is that you wouldn't know if it was fate or my hands." He states.   
  
"Your left," I say. He gives me his fist, and I take the pill without look at it. "I will swallow the one in your right."  
  
"Very well." And he hands me the other pill that I dare not see the colour. I swallow it. "To what fate may hold."  
  
Sleep hits me. I wonder if I have ever been awake for more than four hours.

* * *

When awaking, it is strange that unknown environments cause people to quicken their pace of awareness. This panic would not be a suitable reaction to a new place and should have been erased by natural selection. I do not know where I am, even after I have awaken. I am resting on a thin hard bunk in a room of dirty used metal. Above me is a vent with waving ribbons tied to the bars. My clothes are different but just as messy, with weak cuffs. "Fate." 


	4. Limitless

Better Than Life  
Chapter 4: Limitless  
By: Cornel Kennedy  
  
In stressed situations, I like to grab by hair trying to run my fingers through its knots, but there are no knots in my hair. There is no hair. It's like I have been recruited into a cult, but I don't know from where this comes. Nature? Is there a part of my humanity that rejects the process of brain washing? A lack of one? I think it has existed before the nature in the world in which I exist.  
  
I wake up. This is the dream I have had many times in this year. I am in a vessel of some sort, to that I can find no end. Prehaps there is no end.   
  
The fish food is on the table near the tank and I put some food in not fully aware that the tank is dirty. But I constantly find motion in a toxic environment. Fish have evolved in a way that they can adopt to continuous change. In this instance, they are subjected in the neglect of their water, and swim around in their waste until they are dead. I believe that some have adopted to this and are tolerate of the dose of poisons in the water. In the dose is increased steadily, then the subjects can survive and will be immune to the same about of dosage. This is the same with drug addicts. They cannot get the same high all the time from the same dose. Their bodies will adapt and require a higher dose to get to the same level.  
  
I remember. Everything.   
  
The pills that they had given me no longer erased my memory; everything around me, I knew, is not real. I could feel something in my throat. I had thought it was words that I could never know or release, but what stuck into my throat was real. Everything around me was red.  
  
I kick and moved around, like it was my first time for motion. I pull my weak arms to my mouth and eject the object from my mouth that digs deep into my throat. It was like it did not end, and I pulled harder until the whole contraption cleared by throat. I fought to the top. A slim layer had covered the top and I broke free from it. All around me, as if I woke for the first time, had seemed weird. I could not drink enough to come to this conclusion. Around me were pods; many pods that had carried people just like me. I lift my arm. It is thin, so thin. It is bone and skin. Under the red goo that covers my body, my veins pop out of my arms. Bolts of electricity run down the pods. I was a battery for the machines and had woken up form the truth.  
  
Suddenly, I am ejected from my pod and am sent down a long tube. The tube is round when it is smooth, but certain parts cut my flesh but I cannot scream like I have never breathed for myself. An ending opens and I shoot down into a lake beneath me. It is filled with body parts. I swim to the closest edge and hang on with my small limbs. "I don't know where I came from," I scream and pass out.  
  
When I wake up, my arm is tired and ready to release the pipe on which I hold. I sink below this foul water and a cold body wraps around me and pulls me out. My eyesight is dead and the lights are so bright. Angels lift me up and put me down to rest. "Where am I?"  
  
"Welcome to this world." A deep voice says. "Sleep now."  
  
I comply.  
  
With no agreement, I awake. It was like in my dreams where I am trapped in an unlimited space of reality. "Where am I?"  
  
"This is the real world," I see Morpheus say. "You are one of the few would have exited the Matrix without our help."  
  
"Huh?" I question. Sitting up, I pull the plugs from my body. "But, I took the other pill."  
  
"But your body has been resistant to that pill. You are self-awared. What you always wanted to be." Morpheus says. His hands that are plumb with fat rest me down on the table. "You are out of Samsara."  
  
The light above me gives Morpheus a halo. A fair face enters the screen. "Trinity," I speak.  
  
"What is it?" she responds. I can only see her dark hair hovering over me.   
  
"This doesn't invole an anal probe does it?"  
  
She laughs with beauty. "We would do anything for you."

* * *

No one thinks more about awakening than I. I burb instantly and the reak of my breath is alcoholic. Why did I remember this dream? I had completely missed by bed and lie in a mess of dirty clothes. It is comforting, but I think I know too much for my own safety. At times, when I dream, I am released from my body. It was almost like what ever inhabited by body would know that it did not belong in there. I could move freely. It was hard to move too far, and I could never go down the stairs. But what I have remembered of my dream, I had shot down a long shoot and Trinity, and Morpheus were there. Where was Neo?   
  
In question haunted me and dragged me from reality until I appeared at a table surrounded in darkness. Three children, two boys and a girl, sat at each side of the table and had hovered cards in front of them. They were light blue in skin tone and had flatten noses. Cards floated in front of me as well. "Where was Neo?"  
  
"Outside this limitless prison," a fat boy replies in his gravel voice. It drags on with a low register and will not be interrupted. "Neo has evolved."  
  
"I do not understand," I say to them as my five card hand reduces to three and replaces them with two other cards that float from the deck in the middle of the table. "A single animal cannot evolve. It is the random change of the whole population."  
  
"That is nature's way," the slimmer boy says. "This is a different kind of selection that Neo had gone through. To put it into words you can understand, he has mutilated."  
  
"A freak," I put bluntly. They giggle in excitement, as I think they have much more to tell me.  
  
"As are we," the plumb child says and his full house rests on the table. "We're a produce of what would have happened if our advancement had not been stopped by the machines."  
  
"Not a freak," the girl across from me with no nose and a glow to her speaks and her flush lands down on the table, "but, what could have been."  
  
A four of a kind drops down for the slim boy, "We are a change of becoming the next one."  
  
My hand drops down but I am not interested in the game. They wear their bedtime clothes, and I give them a small smile. "It gives me a hint of satsifaction that I am the next one. It is not exactly a place where you are holding up the line but a position were I am envied."  
  
The pots in front of us reshuffle but I am focusing on the movements of the chips rather than the victor and losers.   
  
"We are experiments," the young girl with pony tails says. They look sick, and in my stick like body, I may be sick as well. "the machines need to end this war so they artifically select beings like us to provide them with more power. With most of the population, there is a slow change in the exchange of memes."  
  
Memes are a unit of information that can be exchanged between two minds. They are like genes but instead of sexual reproduction, it is what cultures have excepted in their way of life. This explains why a person will be so forceful when trying to induce a friend into a part of this culture, be it drugs or a certain band. Survival of the fitness is how information reproduces.   
  
"You're right," the chubby boy says looking deep into my eyes. "Because information has become the new way of storing information, there was a degression of what genes could change physically. This is why the machines have taken over. There is a shortage of change in genes to provide life with the needs to survive the environment."  
  
I did not have to ask for an explaination as the girl picks up were that boy ended. "Like humankind, the machines are running out of resources. There is a form of pollution with that the machines had to deal. They need enegry. Given us the possibility of unlimited power, they have provided themselves with an oppurtinity to tap into our enegry we create."  
  
"But, they can't contain such power," the slim boy warns with a harsh high voice, "it is the hope of humanity that one of us will break free from this prison."  
  
I drum a finger on the table. "I fold."  
  
"It is not that easy," one of them tells me. They are all wise in their own way. A debate starts that involve evolution. This is not the debate between evolution and creationism, but one of the pace that evolution progressions. I admire their positions and their agruments, but I am somewhat unattracted. They converse about the layers of fossils and how the gaps can be explained with reasonable terms. For me, and I dare not insert my opinion, I think that things had to move slowly. There were no large gaps, though I do like what the girl talks about with the increase of evolution.   
  
Once again, I say, "I fold."  
  
They break out of their debate and see into my stained brown eyes. "We are equal."  
  
"Thank you," I say and nod my head. I smile and laugh so loud and violently that they drag their chairs back from the table. They know my thoughts and when I see my pile of chips, they seem large than the rest. I push the chips away with my own hands and shake my head. "I'm drunk. I'll tell you; I'm drunk. I respect you as much as the next professor, yet I am not the one. What can I do to help you?"  
  
"This is our path to become the one." The girl says. I like them, I like them all. "What we know of DNA is but a program. When this system finds out which is the strongest of us, they will cause a reaction to try to contain us. It has never worked, but it is for the survival of this earth. The sun, though in reality has been blocked from the true surface, will be the death of us all if this cirlce continues. We wish to help the machines, but as living creatures, we may also adapt to their scheme and ruin it."  
  
"The machines must learn the Way," I tell them though I am a bit uneasy with the idea of the machines, which I can no longer ignore. Drifting off is what makes me a companion to these freaks; a group in which I belong. Everything I saw was a conspiracy that had lead me believe hat there was some hidden message. I had not found this message, but I will live this message. I remember that the box of liquor had told me: "'You'll find that all great ideas seem absurd at first.' 'Looking back won't get you ahead.' 'If you lose your sense of direction, find your sense of humour.' and finally; 'Life is a mystery to be lived, not solved.' This was my way out, to think about people planning against me, and I could believe they were machines. They truly were machines. The three in front of me had told me so. "The way to continue our exist is beyond nature," I tell them, "but, the way is before nature."  
  
I take a drink from a bottle in front of be about that I know nothing. "Cheers!"   
  
I wipe the excess from the corner of my lips and smile. They pale skinned children laugh. The fat one says: "It comes before nature."  
  
I weep. "You're the best friends I have ever had."  
  
Guess what? I past out and say, "I love you all."  



End file.
